


The Great Hiccups Revelation

by OpalJade



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:10:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpalJade/pseuds/OpalJade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t as if Sherlock knew what he was asking, did he? “Punch me”, “Kiss me”--it was all the same to him. The idea that this was going over the line in terms of personal physical boundaries didn’t even seem to cross his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Great Hiccups Revelation

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Lariope for the beta and the encouragement. Any remaining mistakes are mine. This is not Brit-picked (sorry!)
> 
> * * *

John paused outside the door to his old flat, his head cocked slightly. He could hear the distinctive sound of hiccups coming from inside. 

**_hic_ **

Well, Sherlock should be pleased. He’d been going on _and on_ about the hiccups for the past few days--texting John endlessly about respiratory anatomy and physiology (as if Sherlock had forgotten that he’d spent a ridiculous amount of years learning such things in _medical school_.) 

John wasn’t sure exactly how the hiccups cure mattered in this particular case--to explain an alibi, perhaps?--but it seemed quite important for Sherlock to get to the root of it. Of course, John knew he would be privy to the details of the case if he still lived and worked with Sherlock. They were still friends--good friends--but it was as if the fake death had pushed the pause button on their unique relationship and it seemed that whatever they’d been (best friends? partners? something more?) now hung in limbo. John had signed a lease elsewhere when he thought Sherlock gone for good, and when he’d returned from the dead... well, he just didn’t have it in himself to move back in. Perhaps later, perhaps never. The fact was, John didn’t care to be that invested in Sherlock’s life anymore if Sherlock could so casually... the thought went unfinished in his mind. No sense thinking about this now; it would only serve to stir up things Sherlock obviously didn’t appreciate or even understand. 

John was about to knock on the door--which seemed odd to him because despite everything, 221B still felt like home to him--when Sherlock opened it briskly, grabbed the two bags of groceries from John’s hands, set them on the floor and said, “Kiss me, John.” 

**_hic_**

Sherlock’s thin frame jumped slightly as the force of his hiccups seemed to push his entire torso upwards. John couldn’t restrain his smile. Sherlock’s wild hair and wide eyed expression made him look like an old fashioned marionette being tugged upwards by invisible strings.

“I see you’ve finally succeeded in getting the hiccups?” He entered the flat, reclaimed the Tesco bags from the floor (yes, he still felt the need to feed Sherlock) and headed towards the fridge, but Sherlock stepped in front of him to block his path. 

“Didn’t you hear me? I asked you to kiss me,” asked Sherlock, apparently puzzled that his request had not been taken seriously.

“Kiss you? I assumed you were joking.”

“Why would that be considered humorous? John, I need you to kiss me in exactly two minutes and forty seconds,” said Sherlock. 

“And why would I do such a thing, Sherlock?”

His former flatmate let out a soft sigh but refrained from acting as if John had missed something as grand in magnitude as the sinking of the Titanic. That was another small difference in Sherlock after his death; he seemed to have a greater tolerance for ordinary thought processes. Instead he just walked over to the cluttered table to retrieve a small piece of paper from which he read out loud.

_“Her hiccups started at 14h00. She knew that for a fact because she was in the midst of changing the clock for daylight saving times. Her boyfriend arrived two minutes later, informing her she had the wrong time. The argued for 30 seconds about who had the right time, and at 14h03, she asked him to kiss her to take her hiccups away.”_

**_hic_**

Again, Sherlock’s body jerked upwards slightly, making him pause mid-way. “Are you following me, John?” asked Sherlock as if John himself had been the cause for the interruption. He continued reading without waiting for a reply.

_"Then they proceeded to kiss for five and a half minutes. They didn’t once break contact. They both breathed through their noses. When they stopped, the hiccups were apparently gone.”_

Sherlock tossed the paper back on the table as if that cleared up any questions John might have and checked the stopwatch on his phone.

John did have questions--like how did this fit into the big picture of the case? Why did he need to replicate the conditions? Surely Sherlock knew the kissing thing was unlikely, Jesus, scientists still weren’t in agreement as to what caused myoclonus of the diaphragm, let alone how to end it reliably--but he kept his mouth shut. If he asked questions, Sherlock would know that John hadn’t read the material he’d sent him, would then try to convince him that this is why he needed to move back in, work with him, and it would end with Sherlock’s silence and fake indifference--which aggravated John even more than the sulking tactic he used to do when they lived together.

“So, could you make yourself useful, then?” asked Sherlock as if having John filling up his fridge was a mere frivolity compared to solving the hiccups cure enigma.

“Er, I would--except for the very significant fact that I don’t snog blokes.”

“Well, Mrs Hudson isn’t here.”

“You think she’d kiss you?” 

“I don’t know. Your girlfriend definitely would, though,” said Sherlock not very kindly. “She’s not with you is she by any chance?” Sherlock added, pretending to look for her behind John’s back. 

“You’re not exactly winning me over, Sherlock.” 

“Sorry, John, but you’re wasting time. I have no one else, and I have worked so hard to get the hiccups the past 48 hours. In fact, as a professional man of medicine--who has sworn an oath--is it not a bit unethical for you to let me continue endangering my well being with unsafe food consumption and **_hic_**.”

Sherlock’s little dramatic display lost a bit of flair when he hiccuped again mid-sentence. He looked at the time again and frowned, “John, just kiss me.”

Here he was, asking for a long snog in the same tone and with the same expression as if he wanted John to remove a cumbersome splinter from his big toe. It wasn’t as if Sherlock knew what he was asking, did he? “Punch me”, “Kiss me”--it was all the same to him. The idea that this was going over the line in terms of personal physical boundaries didn’t even seem to cross his mind. 

“I can hardly ask the skull. It is too holey to be a viable assistant in this matter,” Sherlock added as a final argument.

Something tugged slightly inside John when he thought about the fact the Skull had resumed being Sherlock’s sole companion, but he pushed the feeling away quickly. There was a reason Sherlock didn’t have many friends, and he imagined Skull would’ve moved out too if he’d had to witness the scene at St Bart’s.

John saw that Sherlock was becoming a bit frantic--constantly watching the time on his phone. He watched him take three steps to the window and scan Baker St... probably looking for potential helpers. 

Knowing Sherlock, he would just run out on the street and grab some random stranger to do the task in order to test his hypothesis. Or worse, if today’s experiment failed, he would continue to make himself sick with a variety of food and carbonated drinks in order to get the hiccups again. He wouldn’t stop until he got the results he wanted. And just who would kiss him next time it happened? Mrs Hudson? Mycroft?--apart from him, they were his only visitors.

Christ, could he really kiss Sherlock for five minutes, 30 seconds? He bet Sherlock couldn’t. Katie said he probably had zero experience with anything to do with physical intimacy. (hmmm, it was true that his girlfriend did talk a lot about Sherlock.) 

**_hic_ **

“Please.”

He sighed inwardly, wondering how the hell Sherlock had managed to talk him into this. 

“Alright, alright, fine, I’ll... kiss you.” John said exasperated.

Sherlock gave him the tilted-half-smile, the one he saved especially for when he thought he’d won an argument or had his way.

“In seven seconds,” said Sherlock. He set the timer on his phone again and then just stood there in the middle of the living room and looked to John expectantly as if it were up to him to do the rest.

“Well, come here, then,” sighed John. “This is usually done when two people are at least on the same continent.”

Sherlock took one small step towards him--still not close enough--and finally John just clasped him by the shoulders and pulled Sherlock close to him. He’d be damned if Sherlock was going to make him do this again because they’d been “off by three seconds the last time.”

Quickly, he reached his mouth to Sherlock’s and cradled the back of his neck to pull him down a bit into a more comfortable position. He refused to think about the fact that he was kissing another man. Kissing Sherlock. Whatever. He would just focus on the mechanics (and ignore the surprising fact that Sherlock smelled like green apples and that his hair was softer than Katie’s). It wasn’t as if any of this meant anything other than ruling out a hypothesis. 

John had done a lot of snogging in his days, and his tongue instinctively reached between Sherlock’s lips, but they remained closed. Did he not know how to kiss at all, or did he really think that this was the kind of kissing the hiccups girl had meant? Bloody hell, how were they supposed to do this for five minutes? It seemed like an eternity.

 _Sherlock, you need to open your mouth_.

Sherlock finally placed his hands on John’s shoulders and opened his mouth slightly. He was all teeth. John was annoyed because Sherlock was obviously not paying attention to the task at hand and had probably already escaped to his mind palace--or whatever the hell he was calling it these days--and was busy analyzing whether it was the swallowing or the breathing through the nose that might counteract the spasms on the diaphragm nerve. John thought about ending this farce right now but again decided that it was simpler to get Sherlock to do this properly now than to have the same argument next time around. It wasn’t as if he actually wanted Sherlock to respond to the kiss, it was just that he wanted to replicate the parameters of the case as closely as possible so they wouldn’t have to do this again. Fact was, Sherlock was screwing up his own experiment, and John couldn’t bloody well tell him what to do or else they would end up breaking contact. 

So instead he told him with his lips, tongue, with firm sucking bites on his bottom lip; _wider, Sherlock, see?_

John sensed the moment when understanding swamped in. It was as if Sherlock’s wandering mind had just returned to his body and he’d realized what he was supposed to be doing. Sherlock’s fidgety hands left his shoulders and wrapped themselves around his back tightly, and _then_ he opened his mouth wide. He began returning the kiss, moving his lips over John’s without restraint, and at the first contact of tongues, John felt the fine hair at the back of his neck stand on end.

_Not good, John._

John tried to stop his body from reacting to Sherlock’s newfound enthusiasm for the kiss-- _this is just to test a hypothesis_ \-- but when Sherlock began copying his earlier nibbles and bites on his own lips, John realized that he couldn’t prevent his heart from beating wildly in every possible direction. It didn’t seem to matter that Sherlock wasn’t exactly polished, because whatever he lacked in finesse, he made up in intensity. Sherlock kissed the way he solved a case.

 _I’m so screwed,_ John thought, because suddenly, five minutes, thirty-seconds felt more like a looming deadline than an eternity. 

How long had he wanted this? Oh, he’d wondered, yes, he’d thought about kissing Sherlock, but that felt like an eternity ago. He honestly thought that had all dissolved away with the close friendship and the trust. How, exactly, had he convinced himself that agreeing to kissing Sherlock was just for a case? Obviously, he’d unconsciously wanted to cross boundaries that had been best left alone, and more than likely Sherlock had known all along and was presently exploiting that very fact to try to get John to move back in. He should really put a stop to this. 

But then Sherlock hiccuped into the kiss, making him instinctively seal their mouths tighter. John felt powerless to stop Sherlock from pulling him in closer and tighter, his arms overlapping over his back, drawing him up until their chests were pressed together. And if it was any small consolation, Sherlock’s heart seemed to be hammering as wildly as his own. 

They continued like that--mouths joined and tangled up close--until, after a while, the movement of their kiss pushed Sherlock against the table and John’s thigh became firmly lodged between Sherlock’s. A nervous thrill shot through John. It was strangely erotic that their small table--the one where they had spent countless hours working face to face--was now highlighting other ways in which they fit together perfectly. 

Suddenly the sound of the stopwatch buzzed its way loudly across the room, and the two men pulled apart abruptly. Sherlock quickly turned back towards the table to turn off the stopwatch on his phone with an efficient tap of his finger, and John snuck in a deep breath, hoping it would somehow calm his erratic heart rate. And then--as if out of habit--their eyes met in the mirror and John felt something drop low in his stomach due to the sheer intensity of Sherlock’s gaze. John shivered. Sherlock looked entirely too tempting with his hair messy and his lips still wet, red and plump. Hell, he felt like taking Sherlock’s lip in his teeth and biting it. 

Well, there we go... the great hiccups revelation. John was attracted to Sherlock. And obviously Sherlock had deduced that a long time ago. So why the hell had he manufactured the hiccups case? What could his attraction to Sherlock possibly reveal at this point?

“Er, hiccups gone, then?” said John, his voice challenging.

Sherlock squinted his eyes briefly before announcing, “It was the graveyard.”

“Pardon me?”

“The graveyard, John. That’s why you won’t move back in 221B. You care about me, on many levels, but you don’t trust me--and yet you claim to understand that I had no choice in faking my suicide. So, you’ve forgiven me for jumping to my death in front of your eyes, but you are still deeply angry with me. Why? Because you have deduced--correctly, I might add--that I was in the graveyard and witnessed your goodbye by my tombstone that day. You are baffled that I didn’t let you in on the secret after witnessing your--”

“Fuck--what does _this_ have to do with the hiccups, Sherlock?” interrupted John, his voice rising. “Christ, you made up that case--”

Sherlock grabbed John by the forearms and said, “I’m sorry John. _I’m sorry._ You know the bottom line was saving your life, don’t you? But, I should’ve made my presence known at once. Am I right? Is that the problem? Yes, of course it is. How did you know I was there?”

John took a deep breath and felt something in his chest finally dislodge. Yes--that was exactly it--and having Sherlock acknowledge it, apologize for it--felt like maybe things could be mended after all. 

“The first time we talked--when you tried to explain your death--you used my expression. ‘One more miracle.’

“Of course, _yes_. Well spotted. ”

“ _Thanks_ ,” said John incredulously.

Sherlock looked at John and tried to explain. “You think I’m a machine. A machine without feelings. You don’t want to invest in machinery.” It was obvious from his expression that whatever he wanted to say was all tangled on his tongue. He was not good with sentiments, and frankly, he was awful at expressing them. _Good_ , thought John. He deserved Sherlock’s discomfort and awkward words. 

In the end, it was a circular conversation in which Sherlock kept recycling the fact that he had to save John’s life. And the truth was, John _knew_ that he could trust Sherlock with his life, but how could he make Sherlock understand that it was the other things--the ones hidden deep inside and still unlabeled--that he didn’t trust him with?

After a while, John interrupted him and went to the crux of the matter. 

“How in the world were you able to walk away from that bloody graveyard after seeing me like this? _How_ Sherlock?”

“The question is not _how_ , John, but _why_.”

“Tell me why, then.” said John exasperated. “What went through your mind? Had our roles been reversed, I know what _my_ first reaction would’ve been.”

“I don’t base my decisions on reactions. I did a statistical analysis of the situation.”

“Oh, really? And?”

“You’d been in direct line of fire because of me two times. I calculated you were better off without me--in fact, 0.78 safer. Also, I estimated a 0.89 chance that I would die ‘again‘ during my quest to destroy Moriarty’s web. Finally, I was 100% certain that you would not like to bury me twice. It all came down to numbers.”

John sighed. _Numbers and odds._

“I can do my own math homework, Sherlock. In fact I’m quite good at it. What do you think my chances of dying were in Afghanistan? I’ve saved your life a few times too. That would’ve improved your 0.89. And I’m 100% sure that I would’ve rather known you were alive. And that’s with _no_ margin of error.”

“I might have made a mistake,” said Sherlock softly.

“Yes, you did.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“Of course it will, idiot, but sometimes, talking things over with a friend helps to prevent them.”

Sherlock looked at him oddly and then reached a hand to his face, grazing John’s cheekbones with his knuckles. John swallowed.

“Friend? I--”

Sherlock pulled away his hand and looked down at the floor when he heard Mrs Hudson climbing the steps up to the flat and announcing loudly, “Sherlock, you silly boy, no need to leave so many messages on my answering machine. Yes, I’m _sure_ John said he was going to drop by this afternoon.”

John raised an eyebrow at Sherlock. “So about the hiccups thing--”

Mrs Hudson knocked and opened the door. “Oh--John. You’re here!” she said happily. “Sherlock has been waiting for you quite impatiently,” she sighed. “What are the odds that you’ll be moving back in, dear?”

John shook his head and laughed softly, his gaze on the floor. Finally, he looked at Sherlock. He could tell from the light in his eyes that he, too, was amused at Mrs Hudson’s choice of words.

“Yes, probably, Mrs Hudson. There’s a good chance,” replied John finally. “In fact, 0.97.” Let Sherlock wonder about the .03.

“Oh, wonderful,” she beamed. “I think Sherlock is a little lost without you, wouldn’t you say?” she asked, turning towards Sherlock.

“Clearly. John keeps me grounded.”

“Yes--like fog at the airport,” John replied.

Suddenly, it felt like the easy camaraderie between the two men was partly restored, and Sherlock smiled--the smile that John liked best--the one that made dimples appear in Sherlock’s cheeks and made his eyes crinkle slightly. And if Mrs Hudson had not been present, John was sure (100%) that he would’ve taken a chance and kissed Sherlock again--hiccups or not.

The End


End file.
